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The Pirate Bay switched to two Greenland-based domains Tuesday morning but it looks like the party is already over. The company responsible for .GL TLD registrations said they would not allow the domains to be put to illegal use. “Tele-Post has today decided to block access to two domains operated by file-sharing network The Pirate Bay,” the company said. According to TorrentFreak: "Queries to the .GL domain registry now confirm that both the domains in question have been officially suspended."

Scuse me, that magnet link? It does not need trackers, it supplies them. Even they are not necessary if you have a client that supports DHT. Every single one of those (non-tpb) trackers could be down and the link would still function fine. Of course DHT has only been built into every major client for several years now, so why should that be assumed, eh?

Might be worth noting that DHT does require UDP to communicate (no reason it should need to - it just was built that way). If your DHT-enabled client isn't on a network that delivers UDP then you're limited to trackers (which can use TCP).

UDP is difficult to deliver over networks that try to guarantee anonymity, which is something that people who use a site like The Pirate Bay would care about. The fact that most torrent clients leak data doesn't help, though it is solvable by ensuring your torrent client

That seems unlikely, but ok. In that case, go get a torrent of LibreOffice, your favorite Linux distro, or something complete unrelated to TPB. If your Torrent client supports peer exchange and DHT then it will automatically get DHT info from the peers. There's only one global DHT, so as soon as you connect to on DHT-enabled peer then you'll be able to find other DHT nodes and get properly connected.

The part where you think this is still possible without A) using a client built by morons or B) going out of your way to find a client so old that this wasn't a solved problem when it was written. A trained monkey could hardcode every release with a list of known-good peers with static addresses. A little more thought and you'd rig up one or two of your own for your client to try if it goes through the entire known-good list and can't connect to any of them.

That Greenland wants to be 'liberated'? All we have here is another reason to abandon DNS, or at last find a way to make local name caching more feasible. After all, this is the internet. It's supposed to be robust, able to circumvent all blockages.

Seriously! Greenland is still an autonomous country, they should be able to make that decision, not a domain name broker.

Not quite... Greenland is part of Denmark but has extended 'home rule'. It is independent enough to have it's own legal system, but the it is the danish Police that does the police work.

The ruling from the danish "Fogedretten" regarding TPB (forcing the ISPs to DNS-block TPB) has no validity in Greenland and there has been no other legal precent regarding torrents or similar in Greenland. It is therefore not illegal to run a torrent tracker in Greenland and thus it is not "using the.gl domains for illegal purposes". I recommend that TPB sues the domain provider in Greenland in order to get the domains restored.

The ruling from the danish "Fogedretten" regarding TPB (forcing the ISPs to DNS-block TPB) has no validity in Greenland and there has been no other legal precent regarding torrents or similar in Greenland. It is therefore not illegal to run a torrent tracker in Greenland....

Lack of legal precedence doesn't make it legal!
That said, unless the domain have been abused, they would probably win in court...

However, as I didn't read the article, and slashdot (all media) is notoriously known for overrated headlines, I shall assume that there's no substance to this story.

So, is it time to come up with a new system for distributing IP addresses, other than DNS? Or a new means of configuring DNS to make queries to more than just a couple of servers, based on the hosts being queried?

Or take them to the courts, as the website isnt illegal, its not like child porn or anything... its a search engine... no content is hosted, get a precedent set?
or find a country with better laws, dont just give up and move on.

So it is legal for me to set up a website with links to child porn and how to make bombs? Even the Pirate Bay themselves acknowledge what they do is not legal - the PIRATE bay!? If they want to be treated as a legitimate enterprise then the very least they should do is change their name to something less provocative.

That's a fantastic selective quote from the free online dictionary. I have just one question: Why did you leave off the 3rd and 4th definition?
3. One who makes use of or reproduces the work of another without authorization.
4. One that operates an unlicensed, illegal television or radio station.

i think they should change their name to the IntellectualPropertyTheftBay

It's pretty hard to steal intellectual property, the few cases that succeeded are aptly-named AFACT and RIAA. Without means to deprive a rightful owner of their rights, the "worst" (best actually) the rest of us mere mortals can do is copy.

It's not deprivation of the right, it's infringement. If you want an example of someone stealing a copyright, a possible example would be Bridgeport music in their dealings with George Clinton. Even then, fraud is probably more accurate.

And no, saying that infringement is not theft doesn't in any way imply that it is just, just that it is not theft. Murder is not the theft. Jaywalking is not theft. Adultery is not theft. Slander is not theft. Believe it or not, something can be bad and not be thef

As the entire concept of copyright revolves around what is supposed to be an exclusive right to control who makes copies, usurping some of that control by taking matters into ones own hands and making an unauthorized copy *DOES* deprive the copyright holder of some of their rights.

The only way you can argue otherwise is to suggest that the copyright holder shouldn't have had such rights in the first place, but since that's entirely what copyright is, literally, as I said, the right to copy, you may as we

No, it infringes their rights. They still retain their right, it has just been infringed upon it. If someone steals my car, I can no longer prevent other people from using my car unless my car is recovered. If someone infringes my copyright, it in no way interferes with my ability to stop others from infringing my copyright. A much better analogy is trespassing (although, to be clear, it is not trespassing either. Trespassing is a horrible fit, but it's a thousand times better than theft). Someone tre

No, they held the copyright to the work, but there were other copyrights that interfered with it. Nosferatu is currently copyright in most of Europe, but not the US. They owned the copyright, but because the work was derivative, they couldn't make copies. The original version of WKRP in Cincinatti was in a legal limbo as well, since they no longer had a license to use the music in the show. There are a lot of complications with copyright and the James Bond series, with perhaps the most tangled web being

If other copyrights interfere with their freedom to copy the work, then they don't actually have the copyright at all.

Again, copyright is literally the "right to copy". If a person claims they hold a copyright on something, but they don't actually have any legally valid right to control who else may copy the work, then they may actually possess some intellectual property associated with the work, but they do not possess the copyright. They are simply taking something else and calling it "copyright".

Yes, that would be legal. Not so sure about the child porn thing (laws get a bit overboard when it comes to that matter too, even worse than what's surrounding copyright), but linking to bomb building information is not illegal. Last time I checked, information was not outlawed... yet.

I know that our legislators have this pressing urge to make knowledge and information that may harm them illegal, but I sincerely hope that we'll manage to keep it open. Yes, that does of course entail danger. That's a given.

Do you think it would be legal to run ads for drug dealers? I mean, you don't deal drugs, just list the dealers and their pagers! Some of them may just de dealing crummy homeopathetic medicine, but you know damn well most of them would be selling coke and meth. I think it still sucks the balls off a dead moose, but we have to really think about the moral implications instead of just crying "Not fair! I liked it!".

Actually a pretty good idea. Why not? Sure, it might be a tad bit dumb for people to do so since the police will most likely use that list as well to kick down a few doors to meth labs, but hey, what's wrong with advertising them?

Are you a Greenland law specialist then, that you declare this legal? It may be legal in your jurisdiction, but a Dutch court has made most ISPs block access to TPB because it was "illegal". It just may be illegal in Greenland too, what would you know?

Is the data you are downloading saved to the PB servers? no
only the.torrent files (which is legal) shows a link to the tracker which hosts the data that shows the peers, the people who HAVE all or part of the files stored, they are just acting like an ISP, connecting the dots.
the infringing content is not physically on their servers not does the data being transferred pass through their servers, just like google links to bad sites, they arent responsible for the content within those sites.

I agree. I tihnk one of the biggest problems with TPB is its irony and intellectual dishonesty. File sharing is file sharing. CALL IT FILE SHARING YOU STUPID FUCKS. It is not Piracy. Piracy is a naval thing where people from one boat invade another, rape the women, then kill everyone, take anything of value and then set the boat on fire and send it and anyone left alive down to Davy Jone's Locker (and I ain't talkin' about David Bowie or the singer from the Monkees). THAT is Piracy. Some 12 year old in his mom's basement sharing files of crappy mp3s by Katy Perry is NOT A PIRATE. He is sharing files. He cares enough about the stuff that he wants to share it. Sharing is an act of generosity and and affiliation. When TPB and the Pirate Party took a page from the LGBT movement and adopted epithets as their badge, they made a critical fumble, as the ability to philosophically shift to a position of genrosity and giving is basically impossible when you've taken on such a deeply violent and ugly title as Pirate.

So, yes, they need to come up with a positive name that gets at the heart of the matter, that sharing is caring, and digital data is fundamentally different in nature from analogue.

The meaning of words changes over time. User of TPB know that it is copyright infringement, they just don't care. The law is wrong. That 12 year old is guilty of copyright infringement. It's absurd.

Piracy was also the word used by the media companies to describe copyright infringement. TPB turned it around, made being a pirate a badge of honour. Obviously they knew it would be problematic in the media, but that was the point.

They probably won't change the name because they've been tremendously successful politically with this name.

The reason that they're named The Pirate Bay is because in 2001 the entertainment industry set up something called 'The Anti-Pirate Bureau". In response activists set up "The Pirate-Bureau" and later "The Pirate Bay" as well as "The Pirate Party".

They've been so successful at taking over this word that the Anti-Pirate Bureau recently had to give up and change their name to 'The Rights Alliance" becaus

The term piracy in this context stems from the 60s and 70s UK when radio broadcasting was heavily regulated such that there were only 1 or 2 radio stations about.

As such people who wanted more choice in their radio stations, i.e. those that broadcast music and things they were more interested in took boats out into international waters and broadcast there own stations from there where the UK authorities couldn't touch them.

Because they hijacked the airwaves from the high seas, they became known as pirate ra

In all fairness, the people behind the first wave of the propoganda that used 'piracy' in that way were undeniably evil cunts. This was the old iteration of copyright that was implemented as a form of state censorship rooted in the Stationer's Company.

The practice of labelling the infringement of exclusive rights in creative works as "piracy" predates statutory copyright law. Prior to the Statute of Anne in 1710, the Stationers' Company of London in 1557 received a Royal Charter giving the company a monopoly on publication and tasking it with enforcing the charter. Those who violated the charter were labelled pirates as early as 1603.[2]

There you go. Might have been handy had ScentCone provided it, but I found it easily with a Google search on "'piracy' first use copyright infringement". It's a goodly informative, interesting read and quite news to me.

The Wiki article, which we know is not canon for anything, references this text as proof:

But Hinc Pudor! or rather Hinc Dolor, heeres the Diuell! It is not the ratling of all this former haile-shot, that can terrifie our Band of Castalian Pen-men from entring into the field: no, no, the murdring Artillery indeede lyes in the roaring mouthes of a company that looke big as if they were the sole and singular Commanders ouer the maine Army of Poesy, yet (if Hermes muster-booke were searcht ouer) theile be found to be the most pitifull pure fresh-water souldiers: they giue out, that they are heires-apparent to Helicon, but an easy Herald may make them meere yonger brothers, or (to say troth) not so much. Beare witnes all you whose wits make you able to be witnesses in this cause, that heere I meddle not with your good Poets, Nam tales, nusquam sunt hic amplius, If you should rake hell, or (as Aristophanes in his Frog sayes) in any Celler deeper than hell, it is hard to finde Spirits of that Fashion. But those Goblins whom I now am co[n]iuring vp, haue bladder-cheekes puft out like a Swizzers breeches (yet being prickt, there comes out nothing but wind) thin-headed fellowes that liue upon the scraps of inuention and trauell with such vagrant soules, and so like Ghosts in white sheets of paper, that the Statute of Rogues may worthily be sued vpon them, because their wits haue no abiding place, and yet wander without a passe-port. Alas, poore wenches (the nine Muses!) how much are you wrongd, to haue such a number of Bastards lying vpo[n] your hands? But turne them out a begging; or if you cannot be rid of their Riming company (as I thinke it will be very hard) then lay your heauie and immortall curse vpon them, that whatsoeuer they weaue (in the motley-loome of their rustie pates) may like a beggers cloake, be full of stolne patches, and yet neuer a patch like one another, that it may be such true lamentable stuffe, that any honest Christian may be sory to see it. Banish these Word-pirates, (you sacred mistresses of learning) into the gulfe of Barbarisme: doome them euerlastingly to liue among dunces: let them not once lick their lips at the Thespian bowle, but onely be glad (and thanke Apollo for it too) if hereafter (as hitherto they haue alwayes) they may quench their poeticall thirst with small beere. Or if they will needes be stealing your Heliconian Nectar, let them (like the dogs of Nylus,) onely lap and away. For this Goatish swarme are those (that where for these many thousand yeares you went for pure maides) haue taken away your good names, these are they that deflowre your beauties. These are those ranck-riders of Art, that haue so spur-gald your lustie wingd Pegasus, that now he begins to be out of flesh, and (euen only for prouander-sake) is glad to shew tricks like Bancks his Curtall. O you Bookes-sellers (that are Factors to the Liberall Sciences) ouer whose Stalles these Drones do dayly flye humming; let Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, and some other mad Greekes with a band of the Latines, lye like musket-shot in their way, when these Goths and Getes set vpon you in your paper fortifications; it is the only Canon, vpon whose mouth they dare not venture, none but the English will take their parts, therefore feare them not, for such a strong breath haue these chese-eaters, that if they do but blow vpon a booke they imagine straight tis blasted; Quod supra nos; nihil ad nos, (they say) that which is aboue our capacitie, shall not passe vnder our commendation. Yet would I haue these Zoilists (of all other) to reade me, if euer I should write any thing worthily: for the blame that knowne-fooles heape vpon a deseruing labour, does not discredit the same, but makes wise men more perfectly in loue with it. Into such a ones hands therefore if I fortune to fall, I will not shrinke an inche, but euen when his teeth are sharpest, and most ready to bite, I will stop his mouth only with this, Hæc mala sunt, sed tu, non meliora facta.

I don't think the wiki editors are capable of confirming what "Word-pirates" might be talking about there. I will say, the parenthetical "(you sacred mistresses of learning)" really doesn't sound like "copyright violators" to me, but feel free to explain with sources what the f**k you're smoking.

Because it's not credible? Because it's another "factoid" pushed by people to legitimise an otherwise dull and irrelevant argument that has no credence?

I think the most poisonous thing about the internet is not trolls, or bullies, it's the people that either spout or accept "facts" that have no attribution and generally increase the level of entropy in discussion.

And yeah, I read enough to see there was a mismash of quotes of essays, quoting treatises, such that any conscise conclusion was already 4 levels removed from the actual primary source the claim is based on. Did you read that?

First of all, making a mistake for a long time doesn't make it right. Second, are you sure this was about violating someone's copyright and not about violating the right of the king to have a say in who is allowed to print anything at all, and therefore to establish an effective form of censorship?

Did you do a search? Did you not follow up by reading or at least skimming three or four likely-looking results? Did you read the linked piece on the blog?

I agree about the poisonous bit. The piece cited is not, I submit, an example of it. It does need some reasoning to arrive at why that is so. YMMV.

For that matter I've never quite fathomed the twisty mentality of someone who finds joy in plucking legs from ants. Trolls and bullies remind me of people such as that. Now why did I think of that? It c

I saw some references to people and dates relating to material of which I have no ready access, although it was simple enough to establish the reality of those people and material. I had no way to confirm accuracy of items cited in the blog such as page numbers and whatnot.

What I did find and read and skim were (along with the blog in question):

Did you do a search? Did you not follow up by reading or at least skimming three or four likely-looking results? Did you read the linked piece on the blog?

I agree about the poisonous bit. The piece cited is not, I submit, an example of it. It does need some reasoning to arrive at why that is so. YMMV.

For that matter I've never quite fathomed the twisty mentality of someone who finds joy in plucking legs from ants. Trolls and bullies remind me of people such as that. Now why did I think of that? It certainly couldn't have been something you said.

There were many, many, links on that blog, very few of which were to primary sources, none of which proved the point of "piracy is a term in continuous use for about 350 years to mean copyright infringement". That is the claim of the article you linked, and it is in no way proved by the works sited. The author has a clear bias and surely fits my definition of poision as clearly as those that used to say "average temperatures have decreased over 10 years" desipte that being a statistical anomoly that only he

Do you really not know your idea of maritime piracy is the ludicrously overblown tall-tale version?

Bands of thugs in boats stealing and murdering? No that is exactly what piracy on the high seas is about, and, like slavery, it is continuing to this day. [nationalgeographic.com] Unless you think all those navy ships patrolling the Indian Ocean are there for shit and giggles.

To keep it from becoming a mess, we NEED an authoritative entity that keeps track of all the names and numbers. Otherwise, sooner or later, two names will start pointing to the same address. Or, depending on where in the world you are, a name points to different addresses.

Already this has been split into multiple authoritative entities, one for each TLD, and a pool of addresses for each those authorities, and numerous registrars that manage the individual registrations on behalf of those authorities. This a

Is there a good reason there's no pirate DNS service run by someone trustworthy like one of the Pirate Parties that mirrors standard DNS, but overrides it on issues such as this, and on ICE domain seizures? If enough techies started moving friends and family over to it it would weaken the stranglehold of official registrars somewhat and force them to start listening more to the will of the people and less to corporate interests if they wanted to remain relevant no?

It's about time we started investing in the decentralized name server alternatives..P2P fizzled because they couldn't figure out a decentralized distribution mechanism. Thankfully, Namecoin [dot-bit.org] is at v3.5 and only requires adding a DNS resolver to the system.

OK, let's be honest. I like Bitcoin. But I think that Namecoin is a bloody stupid idea. Instead, why not go with a distributed web of trust type system? At the moment most people just trust the root servers. Well, that's a mistake.Simplified example of how it might work like:I trust John and Mary each 100%, if they say that domain example.com belongs to Tim, I believe them. John though, has tendency to trust people I think are a bit sketchy, so anyone he trusts is only going to get 25% from me. That means t

This is pretty much what law enforcement worries about. When darknets become the norm, it becomes a lot harder to crack down on real criminals who now use similar services. Should they cease to exist and they have to "go deeper", it will become a lot more troublesome to keep track of them.

It will just be made illegal to use "darker" nets then the plain web for people without licenses or permits to do so. This is the end game political situation of the web IMHO.

Of course there will always be the one or two outliers who are always one step ahead. But the idea of "law enforcement" is to keep those outliers a small non-mainstream group and focused on criminal activity (from the perspective of the power elite). This way most people will not become disruptive for whatever reason. And "most people"

There is simply no good way to enforce it. Even with deep packet inspection, how do you want to discriminate between "good" encrypted traffic and "bad" one. Outlaw encryption? Banks would cry bloody murder because that would be the death spell for internet banking, along with pretty much every kind of online business.

Even if you outlaw it, there are ALWAYS ways around that. Show me one proxy with deep packet inspection and a rigid dropping strategy and I show you how to circumvent it. If everything else fai

It can be outlawed, because if your not communicating with a bank and instead some random peer in another country, they wont bother inspecting your packets, they'll fine you and throw you in the U.S. Prison system. Probably put you to work sorting through network traffic;p This is were trusted computing starts becoming useful for the gov, like those chips that only run authorized software. But what your explaining is the locks keep honest people out thing.

To clarify, you won't even be able to run a proxy in this end game situation without having to register it with the government and have it open to all kinds of scrutiny. This limits the "everyone and their brother" running a proxy situation. The ISPs could be forced to drop any packets that aren't signed by the software or hardware that, the government authors.

Yeah, the other affect of locking down your own internet ISPs like this is you drive people to 3rd party solutions, satellites etc. But then the game changes from which protocols are banned to, if your caught with a transceiver thats not audited your busted (think non state approved cell phone in NK). I do have an overactive imagination;p

Then again someones already at least beat me to it, thinking of games like Mirrors Edge. The problem with future predictions and thoughts though, is its bad enough trying

ACTUALLY, heres a little bit of secret info
the police prefer NOT to shutdown these P2P networks as it allows them to easily track people who download it.
its a very valuable key for their child porn fight, pretty much says name of file people are downloading and ip address of people downloading... they then grab a search warrant and nab you...
you notice how its always the "content" industry complaining... not the government or police? why? BECAUSE IT ISNT ILLEGAL

Search for any given infohash on Google and see for yourself how many indexers there are other than TPB (with many more appearing every day). Somehow I feel they won't all disappear, not until we get a World Government, or something.;-)

Now, in case they all disappear before we get the aforementioned government, DHT [wikipedia.org] can still do the job, even if it's a bit slow. It also is kinda searchable [btdigg.org] by the way, and expect to see supernode-based structures for fast in-client searching in the future (if they don't alre

And do you really believe that this kind of behavior by the "entertainment" industry is going to make me buy more of their crap?

Keep dreaming...

If I buy something then I decide where and how I will use it. Not you, not the "entertainment" industry can and should decide and control what I can or can not do with the stuff I paid money for. Get it?

And after I bought the movie or music, stop treating me like a damn criminal with your stupid FBI messages about piracy.

But No - you have to control each and every aspect of your crap with drm, region code and other technology crap.

Nowadays copyright and "intellectual" property is one big mechanism to control what users can or can not do. And I will not participate in that!

Maybe, and only due to coercion and bribery. The reason this company is going against TBP is because they are either getting payed to, or coerced to (they will loose business, be fined, sanctioned, harassed, etc.)

To make it clear I respect copyright but not DRM or EULA and I expect it to expire and after a short while (not a whole damn lifetime for a few hours of "work", or even months). I also expect the public domain to be vigorously defended by the people who administrate copyright.

I don't believe this comment was set at -1: as Flamebait. Clearly someone who is quite bias about piracy. But it doesn't change my point of view. And it doesn't even consider whether I'm for or against piracy to begin with.:)

Well, perhaps not/surprised/ since, as it's a country, one might expect it to have its own TLD. But it never crossed my mind to wonder what it might be.

I have to admit, once I learned that its TLD was.GL, the first thing I did was check to see if Open.GL was taken (it is). I can't imagine I was the only one to do so; I wonder how much extra traffic that site is getting today...